Brothers
by A Very Neat Monster
Summary: One-shot. Brian Moser Rudy thinks about his past and his brother as he prepares the unconscious Deb for Dexter. Set during "Born Free," season 1, episode 12. Spoilers for season 1.


**Title:** "Brothers"

**Word Count:** 2,153

**Pairings:** None

**Rating:** T

**Summary:** Brian Moser (Rudy) thinks about his past and his brother as he prepares the unconscious Deb for Dexter. Set during "Born Free," season 1, episode 12.

**Disclaimer:** The characters and premise of this story are owned by Showtime and Jeff Lindsay, not me.

**General Notes:** A quick one-shot. My story is based on Showtime's version of Dexter. I'm giving it a T just to be safe. No actual violence happens in the story, but there are some violent images in Brian's/Rudy's thoughts and memories. Spoilers for season 1.

**Brothers**

I feel close to him as I sink the needle into her neck. As I murmur in her ear while she goes limp in my grasp, I don't usually work this way, but it is part of the scene I have planned for the upcoming reunion, and, more than that, it feels right for tonight.

I'd kept the memories of my little brother dormant during my years in the institution, buried deep as the desires I'd quickly learned to keep hidden from the doctors who continuously probed me with their watchful gazes and searching questions, attempting to dissect my mind on their clipboards. I'd learned in time to fool them, presenting a mask I carefully constructed as I mastered the treacherous, often perplexing maze of human interactions. My only motivation was the tantalizing possibility that, if I could hide my wolf's teeth under enough compliant and good-natured wool, I might finally be set loose to enact the red, gleaming scenarios I spun out each night in the icy theatre of my mind.

I strip off her clothes with rapid efficiency, finally not having to worry about faking any ardor or remaining alert to her expressions in order to be ready to respond to her tiresomely changeable emotions. It feels strange to deviate now from my usual technique, and I take a moment to trace out the lines I would have made my cuts along, as I've done surreptitiously each time we've fucked. But this is a gift, and it would be rude to begin indulging before my brother arrives. So I restrain myself. It is something I would do for no one else.

I have not had to curb my desires in this way in years, and it brings back memories of lying stiffly on the thin, uncomfortable mattress in my tiny white room at the mental hospital, unfurling the great empty canvas of my mind in the dark and filling it with images dredged up from the red, wet floor of a shipping container. I'd built the scenes piece by piece in the ever-expanding spaces in my head as I'd grown older. I had no small skill with a pencil, but it was only a daylight shadow of the care I devoted to constructing these nighttime images. I'd lovingly laid on each detail like another layer of graphite until the substanceless fantasies seemed almost to have the weight of real flesh. And yet, while I hid the truth of my nature from everyone around me, I was never quite alone in my head. In the bright red threshold between my insubstantial early life and the vivid internal world I lived in now, there was always another boy. While his image had grown increasingly hazy, his name had never faded. It was the one anchor I knew I could seek out when I was finally turned out into an unfamiliar world.

But, once I'd been set loose, I hadn't gone to him right away. Naturally, in the headiness of my first freedom, I'd shirked my responsibility to my only family. There had been so many exciting new sensations to at last experience that a blurred form and an old name had been quite overshadowed. For a while I'd even dropped the idea of tracking him down entirely. What did an artist whose medium was the intricate machinery of cold flesh and bone need with a living companion? But after years of drifting from city to city, country to country, I found impossibly that I seemed to have reached the end of my fantasies. They had all been played out, brought to complete fulfillment. Not that my appetite for killing had in any way waned, but I had reached a plateau. There was nothing more for me except repetition of all the old scenes, until a foolish mistake or age caused me to slip up for the first and final time. It was then that the name of my brother had resurfaced and I'd been drawn back to Miami. Appropriately, I found that my anchor had hardly moved from where we'd been born—for the first and second times.

I realize now that I was careless with Tony Tucci. My brother did not seem to have my aesthetic sense and so I'd assumed some of the details of his craft were determined by practicality, not an integral part of his ritual. It had been disrespectful of me. I understood that once the sting of his rejection of my first gift had faded. There were other reasons for that rejection, of course, but if I'd prepared the security guard as I should have, the nature we share would not have been denied. All the therapy and drugs in the arsenals of Florida's psychiatrists could not leash my urges; I am certain that my brother's will not be curbed by a fake conscience grafted onto his shoulder to whisper a dead man's principles in his ear. Not once I show him what he really is, what he can be. What we can be together.

I will be more careful with this one. No detail is left out, from the tape over her mouth to the layers of Saran wrap I wind over her body to pin her to the table. I've been inside my brother's apartment on numerous occasions, and I've visited the place where he works, but this is the first time I feel I've entered his space. I step back from my work and admire the effect for a moment. It is not quite to my taste, but I can appreciate the scene, nonetheless. In spite of the heat in this small room, the light glitters coldly on the plastic and catches along the edges of the tools I've laid out. I can see in the neat, rigid lines created of her body an echo of my own need for perfection and precision.

I'd come to Miami with no clear expectations of what I would find. I'd even been bashful of making Dexter's acquaintance, instead establishing an identity for myself and spending months uncovering every scrap of information I could on his years after the shipping container. I didn't want anything to take me by surprise. I read about Harry Morgan and, gambling that no one like me could have entirely avoided the state's mental health experts, I located the records from Dexter's one brief visit to a psychologist. It had been from these that I'd learned my little brother supposedly remembered nothing of his few years before our mother's murder. I didn't know then if it was truth or a lie, but I'd set out to track down our father and our old house, getting caught up in my own schemes as I set up the elaborate framework in which our reunion would slowly unfold under my careful control. It had been a challenge unlike any I'd experienced in a long time.

And then, finally, I'd gone to see him.

After so many years, I couldn't imagine anything but the little boy I'd held hands with in the dark and blood, so I'd been disappointed in my first glimpse of the man he'd become. He'd looked so ordinary and innocuous as I watched him cross the parking lot towards the police station, exchanging a few words with his fake sister and colleagues. But then I also made a point of looking harmless, I'd reminded myself as I sat in my parked car across the street. So I'd kept trailing him, watching the nauseating spectacle of him doting on that little girlfriend of his and acting the dutiful brother to Debra.

I'd almost given up hope of finding the imagined kindred spirit that had kept me sane—by my standards, anyway—in the institution, when he'd left his apartment one night with a dark bag slung over his shoulder. His movements had seemed more focused than the other times I'd observed him and something in me had stirred with recognition. Following him down Miami's streets, I'd felt the same electricity in my limbs I experienced when I tracked my own prey, even though I'd not yet seen anything to justify my anticipation. But my expectation was satisfied when I saw him leave his car and, after picking the lock, slip into another, where he sank into the shadows of the backseat.

Less than an hour later I was picking my way carefully through the mud along the edges of an abandoned house, struggling to peer through the dingy windows. Undignified, certainly, but all consciousness of the dirt and the foolishness of my position was instantly swept away by dark euphoria when I saw my brother standing over his victim. On the surface, our methods were completely different, but the essential drive was the same. For the first time I was seeing someone else who lived in my world. Someone whose mind, unlike all the others I had ever encountered, would not be as dull and alien to me as the gaze of a sheep. The humans I'd had to live among were driven by base, herd instincts—appetite, lust, a need for proximity to other simple creatures like themselves. It was as though, after years of dumbly pretending to be one of them and aping their meaningless noises, I had finally found someone else who could speak.

I'd left shortly after he sank the saw into the man's neck, stirred by what I'd seen and needing my own form of release. That night I'd made sure to leave my finished project within his station's precinct—my first tentative overture to my brother, like an anonymous, hand-made present wrapped and placed before a school locker, where the object of my admiration was sure to find it. After that, all my kills were as much for him as for me.

Of course some of my initial excitement was dampened when I'd realized what linked all his victims and suspected the reason for it. Harry Morgan. He took Dexter in, trying to treat a lion like a dog—raising him, training him, as though human rules and attachments could even cross the vast distance that set Dexter apart from the cop and his kind, much less cage him. And yet my brother acted like he was behind bars because I had not been there to show him what I had quickly learned in the institution—that the rules governing human society were as meaningless for us as traffic laws in the United States were for a resident of Uganda. I'd envied Dexter, a little, as I'd pieced together the events of his life after we'd been forced apart. He, they'd thought, had been salvageable, and so he'd gotten to grow up in relative comfort and freedom. Yes, his desires would have been kept penned in by his foster father's ridiculous rules, but I am certain he had more freedom to exercise them than I had. In the long run, though, I think now that I was better off. My brother has allowed himself to be lulled into a prison by the animal comforts the Morgan family offered.

That was going to change tonight. All my plans had come to fruition as I'd hoped they would, and now, at last, we were both ready. Tonight I would help Dexter sever the unnecessary ties he had chained himself with and replace this pretend sister with a blood brother.

I remind myself that I must not touch her until my brother arrives, but I can't resist running my fingers along the waiting tools I've laid out for the occasion, enjoying the sensation of slick, cool metal beneath my fingertips. As I lift one of the knives, feeling its weight in my hand, I imagine that, in a few hours, he will be holding it. With everything laying at the ready just the way he likes it, he seems already to be in the room with me. I imagine how the night will unfold. This is for him, and he will start and finish it, but I hope he will share the knife with me in between. It will be a negotiation, new for both of us—a kill that is both mine and his, our signatures side by side in dear Debra's flesh for all of Miami to see. Visible proof that our bond runs deeper than any foster relationship.

We were reborn once together in that shipping container, our old selves irrevocably erased even as we were freed from everything that made the humans that surrounded us so contemptible. Tonight, I hope, we will again become something new together—this time by choice.

I am drawn out of my thoughts by the sound of a car pulling up in the street outside. I lift my head. It is time. Feeling a rare smile curling the corners of my lips, I walk towards the house to meet my brother.


End file.
